so leaks have kind of deliberative value within government for government officials. leaks, i think, serve a strategic precommitment function. there's a lot of executive power scholarship recently that's emphasizing how if you want to be credible as an executive branch, you have to signal to the public that you're acting in law-abiding, responsible ways. how do you do that with such a bloated classification system? one way is leakiness. if we all expect that anything really vile that the executive branch does, it actually in some sense increases our faith in the government in that it's not doing truly prodid crouse things. i think, finally, being leaky staves off more fundamental and painful reform. similar to the last point i made, the executive branch is not forced to address the massive overclassification problem in part because constituencies for transparency feel adequately served that they're getting the info they need to learn. so in sum, i think the situation that we have while david referred to it as a disorderly situation is actually a lot more rational than